by John Carlisle, Detroit Free Press

by John Carlisle, Detroit Free Press

GAINES TOWNSHIP, Mich. -- The entire township police department is in the patrol car on this morning, rolling down the long roads that crisscross the countryside.

The chief is there, along with the detective and the traffic cop. Not to mention the fire investigator and the code enforcement officer.

And only one guy is in the car.

Mark Schmitzer is a jack-of-all-trades. He has to be. He's the only man on the one-man police force in Gaines Township, a rural stretch of farmland just south of Flint, home to about 7,000 people.

That's one cop to protect and serve all of them at once.

The stocky 56-year-old chief with salt-and-pepper hair patrols the streets, answers the calls, makes the arrests, transports the prisoners and fills out the paperwork. On top of that, he investigates fires and inspects zoning violations.

"One day you're an administrator, another day you're a detective, and another day you're a patrolman out here on patrol," he says.

If he answers a call and finds more than one person there, he's immediately outnumbered. For backup in situations like a bar fight or a domestic argument that has turned physical, he has to radio for help and hope someone from a department in a neighboring town can assist.

Earlier this year, the task became so much that he quit his job in protest.

"One guy can do only so much," he says.

The township's board of trustees reacted by eliminating the department, saying the Michigan State Police would patrol the township instead.

But unhappy residents packed the board's next meeting, and trustees reversed their earlier vote. Schmitzer agreed to stay on the job as the township's lone ranger.

The State Police would have provided more officers for patrols, but residents still preferred to have their own sole officer on duty instead of officers from elsewhere.

"People in the community kind of like to have our own identity," Clerk Michael Dowler says.

Searching for a regular

The dispatcher's voice crackles over the radio. A "confused white male" is walking on the side of the road, wearing a gray jacket, the dispatcher says. A nervous passer-by had phoned in the complaint.

Schmitzer is driving through town early on that sunny day, past modest brick roadside homes with spring-green lawns and still-fallow farms stretching far behind them.

It's a slow day, like most days. Schmitzer figures he usually gets about three calls per seven-hour shift. Busy days might bring eight or nine. This was the first of the day, two hours into the shift.

If he ignores the call, the State Police - which helps patrol rural parts of Genesee County like this - would probably answer it.

But Schmitzer has a hunch who it is - a mentally disabled man who lives nearby and sometimes generates 911 calls when he ambles along on his morning walks.

He pauses, thinks it over and radios back that he'll handle it. He turns the car off his route to go looking for the man.

"I can get a state car to come up here, but they won't know him," he says. "If he's my local, I'm gonna know, OK, he belongs here. He's fine - he walks here every morning, and he acts a little different. But he's not dangerous in any way, shape or form."

That kind of intimate knowledge of who's who around here comes from the kind of face-to-face policing that's part of rural life. Schmitzer often has lunch with residents, waves to walkers as he passes them on the road and pulls up to talk with people out in their yards.

"That's about half of what I do, and that's greet and meet," he says.

Schmitzer scans both sides of the road as he slowly drives. No sign of the man, no sign of anyone at all. The only activity comes from chirping birds, grazing horses and barking dogs.

After about 20 minutes, he gives up the search, assuming or hoping the man made his way back home. And Schmitzer returns to his patrol.

The radio interrupts the ride now and then over the next couple of hours with calls from throughout the county. But none are here in Gaines, so there's nothing much to do but drive the township's roads.

A little while later, the chief pulls up to the town's only school, Gaines Elementary, where he sometimes parks the car just to reassure everyone that he's around.

"I make sure the kids get in OK," he says. "Just the presence just makes the people feel safe because they're out here in the middle of nowhere."

He scans the school as his car idles in the lot. "It really doesn't do much, though."

A job after retirement

Two years ago, Schmitzer retired after 25 years as a cop in Flint Township. For years, his patrol took him through low-income, high-crime, violence-prone neighborhoods - the opposite of his current job.

"Five years ago, I had to kill a man," he says. "He already shot two of our officers, and we went in to effect a rescue, and the guy started shooting at us. We returned fire and killed him."

Two months into retirement, he grew bored.

"I had no plan B," he says. "I thought I was just going to be retired and hunt and fish."

Then he heard about the opening for police chief in Gaines Township.

Schmitzer changed his mind about sitting home, applied for the job and got it over seven other applicants.

His department faces the same troubles as any in the state - a prolonged bad economy and cuts in state funding have drained local coffers and forced cities and townships to make hard choices on spending, even on such fundamentals as public safety.

"We can't depend on the State Police, not that they don't do a good job," says Supervisor Chuck Melki. "But we have no control over them. When you have a local police department, you have more control over them meeting the citizens' needs on a day-to-day basis. You're going to get the personal services and the people knowing each other."

The township's choice now is to either continue funding that one officer's position or ask the public - either through a millage or a special assessment - to fund a larger department with a few more officers. The board has until October, when the issue comes up for a vote again, to make a choice.

A sometime shepherd

As in most small towns, there's little crime in Gaines. Schmitzer gets an average of 144 calls per month, he says, and only 50 of those are of a criminal nature. The rest are things like stranded motorists and loose animals.

There's not a lot to patrol, either.

The town has two party stores and no restaurants. Its downtown is a single block in a little village in the middle of the township, featuring the town's lone bar, a post office, a Lions Club and a small library.

"That's my business district right there," Schmitzer says wryly. But he notes that it's livelier than it looks. "We have a tractor parade in the fall."

Still, serious crimes sometimes take place.

There was a barricaded gunman who ran inside his house last November after pointing his weapon at the neighbor's kids earlier that day. It took hours for police to get him to give up and come out.

There was a recent string of daytime burglaries by a crew of heroin addicts from a nearby town. They hit nine homes in the township before being caught in early April.

And there was a raid last year of a man's home where he'd stored an illegal cache of automatic weapons. That man then confessed that someone he knew had killed a woman, and he'd helped him bury her body on a nearby farm. He took the authorities, including Schmitzer, to the spot. It took 15 days of digging for them to find her last July.

But most of the chief's work is what one might expect in a rural area, the kind that a retired urban cop might imagine when applying for this kind of job.

Like herding 35 stray sheep back onto their farm, as Schmitzer did recently, or coaxing bulls or sheep back to their pens.

Like driving 85-year-old Norm back home time after time when he has gone out walking, and it's too far for the frail man to walk back on his own.

Like bringing food from the grocery store to a man stranded in his house with a broken leg.

And like holding the hand of an elderly woman who was having a heart attack as he reassured her and waited with her for an ambulance.

Schmitzer tells these stories as he drives down the township's sleepy roads. Not much else would happen that afternoon.

In the next couple of days, though, things heat up. An ambulance rolls over in a crash. Neighbors get into a dispute, requiring a stern visit from the chief. A dog raids a rabbit hutch.

The chief answers the call - a far cry from the life-and-death police work he used to do.

"You know, I honestly like the action," he says of his years in a rougher town.

As he drives along, he waves to yet another resident walking along the road, the fifth to pass and wave in the past few minutes. The old man out for a spring walk smiles and waves back at his entire police force.